Sit my first AWS certificate exam, here's all the tips

-
The hardest part of the study for the AWS certificate is to evaluate if you're ready to take the exam. And here's what I've done so far and all the resources I found useful. The goal is to:
  • Have a deep understanding of AWS and what certification exam includes;
  • Gain hands-on experience in working on AWS;
  • Able to self-assess to decide if you're ready to sit an exam and pass. 
This guide is to help you pass the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam. 

Understanding the Landscape

If you never work with any AWS services or read anything about it, the first thing you want to do is to gain some basic understanding of the landscape, and build the backbone of your mental model. 

The certification prep page on the AWS website provides a quick guide to exploring the learning path. You can find the exam guide and sample questions, a 6 hours online course, few whitepapers related to the exam.

Let's start with the exam guide. 

The exam guide will give you an overview of what will be included in the exam, and sample questions give you a look and feel of how the exam question looks like. If you don't understand some of the content at first glance, it's totally fine, you will understand more after you study more. 

Personally, I would recommend starting with the online course, and one whitepaper - Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices. 

I found the online course - AWS Certificated Cloud Practitioner 2020 (approximately 6 hours from ACloudGuru) suits me better because it provides more context compares to AWS online course - AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials (Second Edition) if you don't have any knowledge around AWS. 

 And the white paper - Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices will give you a good big picture of how everything hangs together. And this understanding will definitely help you to understand each individual services better.

After this, you can have a quick read-through of Overview of Amazon Web Service. The link here is the latest HTML version, and you can export the pdf version as well. This paper will give you a high-level understanding of what each service does, but probably not detailed enough for you to pass the exam. But don't worry, we will cover those details later.

Finding the Gap and Deepen Your Understanding

Now you should have a basic understanding of AWS. If you take a practice exam with a solid study of the above material, you should at least get 50% of the questions correct.

But this is not enough, you need 70% to pass, and ideally above 80% to make sure you will pass in your first attempt.

I did the ACloudGuru Practice test. And the first 3 attempts with 71%, 78%, and 71%. This helps me uncover a lot of details I missed in the above study.

You can find some free practice exams online as well, but the tests and the review are limited, if you want more extensive practice, they have more paid options as well.
The whole idea of using practice test is to:
  • Uncover the knowledge gap;
  • Get used to the questions, and how it framed;
  • Assess if you can get them correct above 70%, ideally 80% or even higher.
The thing about the practice exam is no one knows how close it is compared to the real exam. So if you pay for the practice exam, please choose the one with the highest rate and positive feedback from other users. 

So far I used the ACloudGuru exam simulator, as I already paid a monthly fee and will get it for free. Other than that, I use the free exam above to test my knowledge as well.

Exam Questions

I decided to research a bit more to understand how close the practice tests I did compare to the real exam, so I can decide if I want to book an exam or not. 

And I found a couple of "real exam dump" online. One of them has a lot of discussion about what could be the answer, and why, which gives me a lot more material to read before the exam and deepen my understanding. When I sit the exam, about 10 questions came from it.  
Hands-on Experience

 You can get some hands-on experience by:

  • Register an AWS account
  • Using existing lab environments
Following the ACloudGuru course, you can register an AWS account, and choose a 12-month free tier plan, to start using AWS, and practice some basic concepts, such as publish a static website using S3, set up a WordPress website using EC2, etc. One thing to remember is some of the options you choose to use might cost you since free-tier doesn't including everything, so do remember to tear down some of the setups if you only want to practice instead of actually running those services in the long term.

Another way is to use Qwiklabs. The registration is free, but you do need the access code to start a lab. The benefits of using Qwiklabs, or similar services, is the lab will automatically provision a lab environment with an AWS account, and when you finish the lab, everything will be torn down automatically. So you just need to focus on the lab content without any need to manage an AWS account yourself or worry about accidental billing. 


 Final Review

Now you should already have a solid understanding of the content covered in the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam. 

If you're not sure, you can always do a quick review. 

Jayendrapatil's blog gives a quick summary covered all the key points you need for the exam. So go and have a read through, and study a bit more if some of the content here still not familiar to you.

Wrap Up

After all the study, hopefully, you will feel confident and ready to book your exam. 

I know some people consider this exam is really easy, while others feel it is really hard. 

Regardless of the feeling, the real goal is to gain some solid learning over time and pass the exam.

Learning is a beautiful thing, hope you enjoy it.  

Comments

Post a Comment